Member Bryce Springfield

Radical democracy is not a term that many of us are used to hearing in our political science courses. You might hear it in one of the few classes that cover social movements and extra-parliamentary politics, but in general students are exclusively exposed to a rather limited understanding of democracy that not only fails to acknowledge the possibility of democracy beyond government, but that also has a fundamental distrust in the capacity of the “bewildered herd” — as Walter Lippmann once called the public — to make its own decisions about the institutions that affect our everyday lives.

This system is one wherein constituents, under a particular constitutional arrangement, “freely and fairly” elect representatives who suggest and vote on government policies on the public’s behalf. In addition, it features a market-based economic system with non-democratic firm-level relations between private owners on the one hand, and non-owner workers and consumers on the other. Many would call this capitalist, representative system a “liberal democracy.”

From direct democracy to liberal democracy

Many prehistoric societies throughout a large span of the human experience saw direct or semi-direct democracy as a natural system of self-management in both politics and economics. Yet in recent history, some have treated liberal democracy as the form of social organization most compatible with human nature.

From what we know about early democracies, several early agricultural societies, such as those of Phoenicia and Mesopotamia, are thought to have adopted democratic institutions long before the Greek city-states did. Going even further back, a wide range of prehistoric societies tended to “make all important collective decisions by consensus, and many of them [did] not even have chiefs,” with larger bands often breaking into smaller units to allow easier consensus-making, according to a 1993 paper.

Some have argued that the democratic aspect of many early societies may have contributed to a largely “peaceful order.” Contrary to what many 19th-century Western thinkers theorized about prehistoric violence and war, available data suggests that only around 2% of human fossils from 2 million to 14,000 years ago show evidence of a “traumatic violent injury,” while that percentage dramatically increased following the development of centralized state societies after the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

In Ancient Athens, from roughly the 6th century BCE to the 4th century BCE (with interruptions), “democracy” referred to a system of active popular participation (limited to adult male citizens) in the formulation of legislation and the exercise of executive functions. The selection of the citizens who performed these functions was accomplished via sortition, in that members of the public were chosen at random to participate in decision-making assemblies, similar to modern juries. Though limited in terms of inclusion, Athens exercised a much more direct form of democracy than that of today’s Western democracies. The Roman Republic (509 BCE — 27 BCE), on the other hand, is the most influential early case of a representative democracy, with popularly elected officials performing political duties instead of the people themselves, inspiring future democratic republics.

Fast forward to the 18th century, and one observes the “liberal democratic” model developing as an alternative to the radically authoritarian and feudal regimes that dominated Europe at the time. With the support of a range of Western intellectuals, often viewed as an extremist and unreasonable fringe by their contemporaries, the idea of a representative democratic government featuring constitutional rights and a capitalist economy posed a deep challenge to existing institutions. Over time, liberal democratic ideals gained significant traction among European publics, enabling revolutions first in the American colonies and then France, and later in other European countries and, eventually, their colonies as well.

I mention these details to put liberal democracy, particularly its representative democratic and capitalist elements, in perspective; they are but a blip in human history, and thus are clearly not the products of human nature until recent centuries.

Today’s crisis of liberal democracy

I agree with the premise that the formation and expansion of liberal democracy over the last three centuries marks a positive change in human development away from authoritarian and feudal systems of political and economic domination. This revolutionary process has normalized democracy as a universal ideal, and standardized legal equality as well as freedom of thought, speech, association, religion, and the press. Liberal democracies have often failed to live up to these same ideals, particularly when it comes to domestic social equality and colonial domination, but in many cases they have successfully challenged and overturned systems of oppression around the world.

In today’s age, however, there are a few respects in which liberal democracy is failing to meet the rising standards expected by working-class people who make up the global majority.

Capitalist economy

Recent polls reveal that a staggering 60% of an international sample of workers are emotionally detached at work, while only 33% feel engaged with their labor. In the US, the standard-bearer of global capitalism, 50% of workers report frequent stress at work, with their most frequently reported cause of workplace dissatisfaction being unfair treatment.

Though even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels openly acknowledged the incredible power of capitalism as a force for global industrialization, capitalism is a fundamentally undemocratic system wherein the owners of the means of production (i.e., capitalists) hold outsized power over those who operate the means of production (i.e., workers). Similar criticisms have been made about many state socialist solutions, like those of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and various other experiments where production was controlled by an undemocratic bureaucratic apparatus holding outsized power over the workers they claimed to represent — an arrangement often justified by asserting that the Communist Party aristocracy was the workers, or even that the masses were too stupid to direct their own workplaces. Yet mainstream political commentators rarely extend this criticism to capitalism, even though a nearly identical logic applies.

As the anti-authoritarian left has understood for generations, in either of these systems — no more in the authoritarian socialist case than in the capitalist case — the workplace where most workers spend the majority of their lives is dictatorially controlled by an unelected executive or board of executives, who may arbitrarily set wages and undemocratically select unit managers. Even in wealthy social democracies with strong welfare programs and powerful labor unions, workers are forced to remain employed to avoid a squalid lifestyle. Meanwhile, in the Global South, the consequences for those who choose not to degrade their bodies, minds, and time enough for capitalism can include starvation or death. In either case, it is a “free” choice between exhaustion or poverty.

Working conditions around the world are often very poor, woefully ill-compensatory for the economic value produced, and even unsafe due to workers’ lack of influence over workplace decision-making. On the other hand, if workers could exercise democracy in the workplace, it is highly likely that they would not make the same decisions as those of a disconnected capitalist on issues related to safety, benefits, wages, and employment. Not only that, workers would also have more direct incentives to reduce irresponsible risk because of profit sharing and increased sensitivity to the threat of losing their jobs. Reducing risk throughout the economy would then mitigate the possibility of bankruptcy and wider economic crises, and give innovators fewer negative incentives and more financial stability to do their valuable work.

Furthermore, workplace democracy would address the “local knowledge problem” that right-wing economists seem all too happy to attribute to centrally-planned economies. This theory refers to the argument that central planners, such as those of state socialist regimes, lack much of the information necessary for rational economic decision-making, as such information is distributed amongst individual actors.

Yet under capitalism as well, owners, executives, and high-level managers frequently do not have extensive direct experience in everyday work, limiting the information they have to make informed firm-level plans. By ensuring that all of those who work for the factories, the shops, and the gig services have an input in the direction of their respective firms, whether through representatives or direct decision-making, firms can be better equipped to improve efficiency, productivity, and stability.

These theoretical predictions are generally supported by major literature reviews of both worker-owned cooperatives and, to a lesser extent, union-represented workplaces. Worker cooperatives tend to be more productive and stable through recessions than other firms, and they also tend to have longer lifespans, greater employee satisfaction, lower employee turnover, and greater efficiency. Union-represented workplaces also see significantly higher pay than comparable workplaces, as well as better workplace safety and increased firm stability.

Representative democratic government

Although some countries express satisfaction with their representative systems, support for democracy in many countries has significantly declined, while in others pro-democracy sentiment has simply always been low. In a 34-country survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2019, the median country had 52% dissatisfaction with democracy in their country, compared to a mere 44% satisfaction. In Latin America, a very high portion of respondents — 70% — said they were dissatisfied with democracy in their respective countries, with countries like Ecuador and Peru in particular seeing around 10% satisfaction. This data reflects significant declines in democratic satisfaction from just two or three decades ago.

What is causing this? One possible reason could be that populations are feeling increasingly disconnected from their representatives, with 64% of citizens in the median country surveyed by the Pew Research Center agreeing that elected officials do not care about “what people like them think.” In many representative democracies, campaign donations and politicians’ own investments provide incentives to stray from the popular will in favor of special interests. In the US, we can see this tendency expressed in relation to a vast range of policies — from universal healthcare to free college, to marijuana legalization, to abortion rights, to a $15 minimum wage — each of which have strong public support, but none are currently close to promulgation at the national level. A variety of studies have demonstrated that United States representatives, though partly influenced by voter preferences, frequently give outsized preference to policies favored by the wealthy.

One factor that may explain this proposed relationship is the fact that elected representatives, on average, are not of comparable socio-economic status to that of the general public, typically being significantly wealthier. As a consequence, even those potentially sympathetic to the working class simply do not experience the everyday difficulties that workers regularly face, and can therefore suffer from, again, the local knowledge problem frequently cited by right-wing economists.

These developments are especially dangerous in light of the democratic backsliding that has recently occurred in Hungary, Poland, Nicaragua, Bolivia, India, Tunisia, Turkey, and other countries where executives and single parties have increasingly dominated over legislatures and courts, and have enforced laws that seriously limit media and associational freedoms. These trends likewise menace the United States, where several major politicians have denied election results and where state governments regularly limit voting rights. As confidence in democracy declines, more and more countries are at risk of autocratization — an alternative that I, along with liberal democrats, assert is worse than the liberal democratic arrangement.

Some theorists of democratic backsliding, such as the authors of How Democracies Die — the book that apparently helped push Joe Biden to run for president in 2020 — have argued that merely “restor[ing] the basic norms” of liberal democracy and including a more diverse range of people within the liberal democratic mechanisms will be enough to save democracy. However, the true roots of democratic backsliding go much deeper than this, as has been shown in the above analysis.

Further than merely questioning the status quo — a civic duty in any healthy democracy — authoritarian populists threaten democracy by claiming to be the only ones who can truly represent the “real people.” But creating the institutions and providing the spare time for people to represent themselves could put a significant number of obstacles in the way of these despotic distortions of the public will. The capacity of authoritarian populists to skillfully abuse the top-down model of representative democracy in order to disseminate antidemocratic attitudes and reforms would be largely immobilized in such a scenario.

Given that authoritarian populists are the usual suspects in advancing democratic backsliding in the modern day, and that said authoritarian populists gain power through the personality-oriented politics of representative democracies, it would serve democrats well to push for an alternative that makes the path to autocratization much more challenging.

Radical democracy as an alternative

A few radical democratic projects have succeeded in reviving direct democratic as well as workplace democratic ideals in the last few decades, while simultaneously maintaining the benefits of constitutional rights prioritized by liberal regimes.

In 1994, for example, a large portion of the Mexican state of Chiapas established autonomy through the high-profile Zapatista Uprising, which was waged in protest against what the largely indigenous population saw as an authoritarian and undemocratic government. Since then, 360,000 Zapatistas have enjoyed participatory democracy in a decentralized system of government, alongside a democratic economy consisting of worker cooperatives and common ownership of land, and a democratic education system involving both students and parents.

In 2012, during the Syrian Civil War, four million people suffering under the aggression of the Syrian and Turkish governments, as well as of ISIS, formed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (also known as Rojava). They gained their autonomy through the establishment of a federalist system of participatory democracy, with significant sectors of the economy being managed democratically through worker cooperatives and workers’ councils.

But what would such a system look like for Princeton students? I will end with a description of a hypothetical alternate universe in which Princeton students live in a radically democratic society.

Suppose that in this alternate universe, there is a major push among students for the University to divest from fossil fuels. If the level of support for this change was similar to that in our universe, divestment would be an overwhelmingly obvious policy to pursue, given that 82% of undergraduates favor it. Assuming that a majority of University employees and graduate students also agree with this change, which is a fair supposition given the high number of faculty endorsements behind it and the generally liberal or leftist political attitudes of students and working New Jersey residents, the matter of fossil fuel divestment could be resolved almost immediately, as opposed to only partially after many years.

Suppose that just like at the real Princeton, the alternate Math Department enjoys an atrocious reputation among undergraduate students for the poor organization of its courses and the mind-numbing teaching style of some of its professors. With student input actually counting for something, rather than simply being diverted into listening sessions, and then committee meetings, before finally being ignored, perhaps students could successfully influence the department into seeking out more dedicated lecturers rather than only researchers who may not be passionate about teaching their students.

Suppose that you work at the local Starbucks on Nassau Street, and you hate the grueling working conditions there, as plenty of baristas have expressed in our own universe. If the Starbucks were a worker cooperative, the employees who keep the store running would have significantly more power over their wage rates and working conditions, meaning they could raise wages to a level that encourages both higher productivity and more job applicants. Workers would ensure that profits are no longer aimed at supporting investors and executives, but rather at supporting all who contribute to the productive process.

Within the government of this alternate universe, perhaps marijuana would be quickly legalized, so students would not have to worry about state violence or University discipline against them for using the drug. Perhaps we would already have a public healthcare system that eliminates the frustrating and expensive reimbursement bureaucracy we face with the Student Health Plan, and we would not have to carefully search for in-network doctors nearby — instead, we would know that all doctors are covered.

And finally, with mechanisms of direct participation, perhaps we could reduce the level of atomization and loneliness in our society, and therefore develop a better sense of mutual understanding and respect for each other and the issues that matter to us. Maybe psychologists both on- and off-campus would be offered higher pay through their own workplace democracies, as well as through popular participation in public healthcare policy. This would encourage more psychologists to come and support young people, a particularly vulnerable demographic in terms of mental health issues, a key concern for many in the Princeton community given the alarming number of recent mental health-related tragedies.

Liberal democratic institutions are failing us at this stage of human development. Radical democracy, on the other hand, provides answers to many of the dissatisfactions that students, workers, and voters now face. Thus, radical democracy offers a new understanding of democracy appropriate for a new age.

This piece was originally published in The Princeton Progressive.

Member Bryce Springfield

During my first semester at Princeton, I, like many students, decided to look into student organizations that I could get involved with going forward. Apart from wishing to satisfy my “speedcubing” hobby with the Cube Club, I also looked into left-wing organizations to which I could contribute, as I had been a committed socialist for several years at that point.

While several left-wing organizations had gone dormant, one that caught my interest was The Prog. A quick glance at the description made The Prog seem like a great fit for me: it is Princeton’s only left-wing campus newspaper written by and for students. However, after taking a look at The Prog’s website, one piece raised a lot of questions for me: “OPINION: What’s Really Happening in Xinjiang?” by an anonymous author. As I read the article, I found myself disappointed with the article’s arguments, which sounded similar to points I had heard from some Marxist-Leninists and even the Chinese government’s own public comments.

My first thought was this: the Left is meant to question the status quo and its institutions. Considering the pervasiveness of capitalist institutions in China’s economy and authoritarian bureaucracy, one should think that a minimization of the Chinese government’s oppression of minority groups should be something that leftists radically reject. However, I did not find this article to follow that ideal.

In its introduction, the author of “What’s Really Happening in Xinjiang” rightly points out that the United States has utilized unfounded claims and racist propaganda to justify its imperialist ambitions. Most visibly, this is what happened after the September 11 terrorist attacks as President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” in response. Many Muslim Americans were targeted and discriminated against by individuals and the government, which has had lasting repercussions until today. Even in recent years, nearly half of Americans see Muslims as a group more inclined to violence than others, and Muslims are the least approved-of religious group in the United States, according to survey data from the Pew Research Center.

The War on Terror gained widespread legitimacy and support through the construction of an Islamic “threat” that justified US-backed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and other regions, leading to at least 37 million displacements, mass food insecurity, and the deaths of 897,000 to 929,000 people.

Yet, alongside vague references to “CIA front groups, defense contractors, and Western government sources” fabricating empirical support for key claims regarding the genocide, the author resorts to suspiciously familiar fearmongering about the “increasing radicalization of some of [Xinjiang’s] Islamic citizens” — referring to a few notable cases of terrorism — as, seemingly, a mitigating factor for the oppression that the Chinese government commits against an entire population. Though I applaud the author for at least acknowledging officials’ “eager[ness] to surveil, arrest, and racially profile Uyghurs,” some parts of the article appear to me to question whether key claims of atrocities in Xinjiang are true or imply an alternative framing of “vocational schools.”

In this article, I hope to demonstrate compelling evidence from the Chinese government itself and other openly available sources to emphasize the state oppression of Uyghur Muslims in the majority-minority Xinjiang province, particularly from 2017 to 2019. Then, I will discuss how leftists can reconcile legitimate claims of atrocities with anti-imperialism and international solidarity against statist and capitalist systems that profit off of oppressed groups.

Genocide

Of course, “genocide” is often a loaded term used to overcharacterize a wide range of atrocities, as the author of the opinion piece points out. For the sake of using this word in line with international standards, I will compare the United Nations’ definition of genocide with what I believe is occurring in Xinjiang based solely on the information presented in this article.

In Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or simply the Genocide Convention, ratified or acceded to by 149 countries, including China, the following definition was approved:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Most people likely immediately only think of part (a), but this excerpt demonstrates that genocide also includes other sorts of atrocities while maintaining clear, defined bounds. In the case of Xinjiang since at least 2017, I would argue that, with the points made in this article, at least (b) through (d) likely apply due to mandatory “re-education” for Muslim practices and especially forced birth prevention. Therefore, I will use the term “Uyghur genocide” to refer to the state oppression particularly against Muslims in Xinjiang, but that may also target others in Xinjiang.

For the purposes of this article, in addition to mentioning a few things about forced cultural assimilation (which some refer to as “cultural genocide”), I will primarily focus on the genocidal aspects of oppression in Xinjiang according to the UN definition, although there is also much to be said about surveillance and repression of free expression in Xinjiang for the sake of “stability,” including against activists pushing for — and this is of particular interest to the Left — environmental protections.

Internment Camps

The most well-reported aspect of the Uyghur genocide is perhaps its internment camps, described by the Chinese government as “vocational education and training centers” or “re-education camps.” According to Chinese government officials, there is an “urgent need” for these camps in order to fight the “Three Evil Forces” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism that have threatened Chinese territorial and civil stability “[b]etween 1990 and the end of 2016.”

Shortly after this policy realignment, the creation of internment camps was first observed in 2017. In 2018, Xinjiang officials responded by either denying the camps’ existence or justifying them as agents of social stability and economic growth. What is interesting is that in 2015, a few years before this major policy shift, Chinese government officials claimed that they had already been extremely effective in preventing terrorist attacks, indicating that the new policies in Xinjiang were not in response to heightened terrorist activity.

Since then, Chinese government sources have shifted toward acknowledging the re-education camps and have even invited Western journalists to observe them under highly restrictive conditions, presenting them as bona fide educational facilities. However, an analysis of the birth rates and arrest rates in Xinjiang suggests something more nefarious.

Crude birth rates and incarceration rates

One does not need to rely on Western researchers or on testimonials to find drastic irregularities that cannot reasonably be explained by normal demographic or developmental trends. In fact, we only need to look at the Chinese government’s own annual statistical reports, the China Statistical Yearbooks, which it publishes online and in print. Unfortunately, the Yearbooks do not report on ethnic breakdowns. Regardless, an analysis of the provided data points to abnormal trends in Xinjiang, which is mostly populated by minority groups and nearly half Uyghur, that are not observed in other regions in the same time frame.

The first piece of evidence that should raise serious concern is Xinjiang’s change in birth rates over the last few years. Although the Chinese government began omitting regional birth rates from the 2020 statistics, the data up to 2019 is clearly unusual.

My analysis begins with recent regional birth rate data from 2013 through 2019 provided by the China Statistical Yearbooks. Below are a couple of graphs I constructed to visualize the data. In the first, we see a significant drop of 49% in the annual birth rate in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2019, which is a much faster drop than that of China as a whole. This brings the regional birth rates significantly below that of the country, which is all the more concerning given that Xinjiang’s historical birth rates had been notably higher than that of the national average.

To compare this to other regions in China, below is a histogram showing Xinjiang as the lowest instance of birth rates from 2017, when the “vocational camps” opened, to 2019. One thing to note is that with the rescinding of the One Child Policy in 2015 and 2016, according to many Chinese demographers, we should see an immediate increase in birth rates followed by decreases over this period — due to “two-child policies” — to a greater extent than natural changes. Given that Xinjiang was exempted from having one-child restrictions as mentioned in the article, meaning it should not have experienced shocks from this, it should be concerning that it is an extreme outlier even compared to other Chinese provinces that were expected to experience significant changes.

The only comparable drop in reported birth rates since 1950 that I am aware of is that of Greenland from mass sterilization under Danish colonial rule, which is a fitting comparison. Even this, however, was over the course of nearly a decade rather than two years.

We see unusual changes in official contraceptive data in 2018 in Xinjiang, as well. In the China Health Statistical Yearbooks, we see rapid increases in the national proportion of sterilizations — which include vasectomies and “tube tying” — in Xinjiang especially in 2018. The author of the original article correctly notes that Adrian Zenz, a far-right fundamentalist and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation widely cited for claims about the Uyghur genocide, performed serious errors in his calculations of sterilizations in Xinjiang, but the data displayed below demonstrates the point to be generally correct, despite his obvious biases and propensity to exaggerate.

In addition to information on birth rates and birth control, we can look at incarceration rates reported by government officials in various work reports. Analyzing the official work reports of the Xinjiang provincial government and the Chinese national government, I produced the graph below to represent the percentage of arrests in China as a whole that were in Xinjiang. Clear abnormalities are present from 2017 to 2019, and provincial reports are notably missing from 2022, when national arrests exploded from the White Paper Protests, where protestors sang “The Internationale” and other socialist messaging against authoritarian suppression, particularly aggravated by the Ürümqi fire in Xinjiang. Incidentally, while the arrest reports mention the regulation of monopolies and fraud, their defense of capital is evident in their talk of promoting the “deep integration of party building and business,” “serving private enterprises,” and highlighting the punishment of “crimes against the legitimate rights and interests of private enterprises.” This is a topic I will return to later.

Despite Xinjiang being just 1.5% of the national population, it quickly went from making up less than 5% of national arrests to more than 20% after 2017, and arrests remained quite high in the following years. Considering that terrorist incidents in Xinjiang did not more than quadruple between 2016 and 2017, this should suggest that a campaign against a more vast swath of the population had been coordinated.

Razing of cultural sites

Beyond statistical data on reproduction and incarceration, it is also important to look at the cultural effects of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which may also help us think about why China chose to ramp up repression in the region despite declining terrorist incidents. Evidence from publicly available satellite imagery has been studied to look at how religious and cultural sites in Xinjiang have been affected. Systematic studies have demonstrated an unusual 32% of mosques in Xinjiang having been destroyed and another 28% significantly damaged between 2017 and 2020. One of the more visible examples of this was the erasure of the ancient Imam Asim Shrine, where thousands of Muslim pilgrims regularly prayed and tied flags just a decade ago before its apparent destruction.

Islamophobic legislation

Next, I will examine the policies and prevailing ideas that may be driving Uyghur persecution in Xinjiang. For this, I closely read the 2017 “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Regulation on De-Extremification,” hosted on the Xinjiang regional government’s website. While I used a browser extension to translate the document, which could lead to misinterpretation, others have performed their own translations, which read similarly to my computer translation. Revisions to the law in 2018 see nearly identical restrictions.

Beginning in Chapter I, article 3 of the legislation, the definition of “extremification” is left very broad. Specifically, it notes that “[e]xtremification … refers to speech and actions under the influence of extremism, that spread radical religious ideology, and reject and interfere with normal production and livelihood.” Extremism refers to ideas and behaviors that “incite hatred and discrimination, and advocate violence by distorting religious teaching and other methods.”

What is inciting hatred and discrimination, or violence? What is “radical religious ideology”? What is considered an interference “with normal production and livelihood”? These questions are not answered in the document and these terms are left open to interpretation so that any idea one may find challenging could be a “violent” thought and any behavior deemed atypical could be “radical” and interfere with “normal production.” This enables the document to provide sweeping powers to the government to persecute Muslims in Xinjiang who adopt more visibly Islamic clothing, speech, traditions, and political and religious thought.

The legislation specifically prohibits “irregular beards or name selection,” the wearing of “burqas with face coverings,” or other “symbols of extremification” in Chapter II. The former two restrictions are common presentations and behaviors of Muslims worldwide, and the latter can describe anything the government deems as “extreme,” leaving ample room for arbitrary discrimination.

In Chapter III, the legislation reveals the main objective of these strict regulations: “De-extremification shall persist in the correct political orientation and direction of public opinion” (Article 12) and “shall do a good job of … combining ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral corrections, and skills training [emphases added]” (Article 14). From this 2017 legislation, the pervading theme seems to be the Chinese and Xinjiang governments’ interest in forcing cultural and political conformity and the “correct political orientation” of Xi Jinping onto the Uyghur and Muslim populations of Xinjiang.

Global imperialist and capitalist intersections

As mentioned in the opening paragraphs, it is important to recognize that the justifications given by Chinese officials for increased control of the Uyghur population is a continuation of the global “War on Terror” proliferated by the United States. After the September 11 attacks, Chinese state rhetoric on the Uyghur population shifted toward dubiously connecting Uyghur organizations and jihadist groups rather than emphasizing “pan-Turkic separatism.” In fact, some of the United States’ current foreign policies in Central Asia may actually bolster the deportation of Uyghur Muslims to China, as the US subsidizes security systems and massive hauls of military equipment for authoritarian regimes in the region who are themselves supportive of the crackdowns in Xinjiang or who find some of their own Uyghur citizens too disruptive.

It should be mentioned that the Chinese government stands to benefit from oil deposits and other economic opportunities through its grip on Xinjiang and by employing War on Terror-esque justifications against the majority Muslim peoples that populate much of the province.

In addition, while labor conditions in China as a whole are quite squalid, oppression and surveillance in Xinjiang have been particularly beneficial to global capitalism’s exploitation of workers for endless profit. Regardless of concerns about human rights violations in Xinjiang, companies like Nike and Tesla benefit from the province’s cotton and polysilicon production supported by forced laborers and actively try to water down labor laws related to it; and billions have been invested in public-private security technology partnerships, drastically higher than in previous years. Meanwhile, as hinted in the section on incarceration, the Chinese Communist Party’s deep defense of private interests is clear in its own rhetoric and overt actions, even incorporating capitalist CEOs and business leaders as a major part of the National People’s Congress and as a core piece of the Party itself.

* * *

There is far more to be said about the complexities of state oppression in Xinjiang, including the silencing of left-wing activists, anti-LGBTQ laws, the government leaks of mass surveillance data, the heavily restricted conditions of foreign inspections, and more. Alas, there is only so much that can fit in one piece.

Of course, several aspects of what has been documented in Xinjiang have been committed by Western governments, particularly toward indigenous and Black populations. However, this does not mean that the Uyghur genocide is any less troubling because other countries do the same. It does indicate that the working class has multiple competing enemies sustaining the same system of globalized state capitalism. To this day, state oppression in Xinjiang benefits global capitalism, including Western firms, through its securitization and production of materials under poor conditions. We must find ways to liberate the oppressed in Xinjiang, regardless of the atrocities of either “side.”

We should always question government and corporate media narratives as well as their motives. However, we can look at concrete data and other public information to substantiate at least some claims espoused by agenda setters. Perhaps exaggerated conclusions and the history of US imperialism rightly result in a higher degree of skepticism, but, in this case, we have convincing primary source evidence available, free from the manipulation of US propaganda outlets, Adrian Zenz, or any other potentially biased Western source.

As leftists, we should respond to the clear motives that some interest groups and US officials have regarding the expansion of US imperialism not by trying to dismiss or mitigate claims of atrocities as only “in service of a larger imperial project” or by giving credibility to government-constructed visits or other authoritarian governments’ representatives and ambassadors, but by educating our peers about what war hawks wish to do with information of atrocities. US statements and policies acknowledging the Uyghur genocide are not the problem; the problem is the imperialist tendencies of the United States and the influence that pro-interventionist interest groups have over our government.

It is not easy to provide a simple solution to end and provide restitution for the oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, but surely most leftists can agree that putting American boots in China or attempting to externally change the country’s regime aren’t viable options if we want to reduce violence and promote freedom across the world. Part of the solution will need to involve teaching international solidarity for the liberation of all working class people, including for Chinese Uyghurs potentially seeking refuge. This is what many in the Muslim world have already demonstrated through mass demonstrations in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Indonesia, just to name a few, and through polls in Palestine. It may also involve accepting refugees, and independent socialist groups developing alternative media and support infrastructure to aid those potentially suffering from oppression or organizing for liberation.

Neither the US’s democratic capitalism nor China’s capitalism with Marxist–Leninist aesthetics will save us. Only the working class can save itself through building solidarity and, in this case, critically assessing claims of atrocities without lending fallacious credibility to either imperialist or denialist tendencies.

This piece was originally published in The Princeton Progressive.

Our focus this week is on Cuba, where a 62 year blockade is being continued by President Biden. We’ll be hearing from the DSA. International Committee activists campaigning to end the blockade on a recent political win, and a from Desirée Michelle Molina, a recent Columbia University graduate who has just spent four months living in the country.  Our episode starts with an update from Jeremy Cohan, co-chair of New York City DSA, about what to expect from the DSA’s National Convention in Chicago this weekend.

On Monday, July 24, 2023, Columbus City Council voted 6-1 to approve the American Campus Communities / Blackstone development proposed at 50 West Lane Avenue.

Blackstone is the largest corporate landlord in history. They own thousands upon thousands of properties across the United States and abroad. They have earned international condemnation for their aggressive rent hikes and use of eviction as a profit-making scheme.

Now, City Council has given them a piece of our city–and are poised to sweeten the deal even further by handing over the public’s money in the form of tax abatements.

Despite so many community members testifying about Blackstone’s horrific human rights record and business practices–including its having been lambasted by the United Nations for its role in the global housing crisis–Council rolled out the red carpet to welcome them into our housing market. Even worse, Blackstone indicated that they intend to seek tax abatements for their trouble.

This is yet another example of Council weighing the business interest of a developer over the wellbeing of its constituents. It confirms our fear that Council’s purported “Housing for All” policies are a sham, meant only to placate voters while they continue to line corporations’ pockets with money lifted from our neighborhoods and schools.
For months, constituents flooded Columbus’s democratic channels with their fears over Blackstone coming into our city, providing written and spoken testimony at the University District Area Commission, the Development Commission, and finally, City Council. Of these bodies, only the Area Commission rejected the proposal, though City Council neglected to listen even to them.

Columbus DSA’s Housing Priority Campaign made it our responsibility to inform the public about Blackstone’s abysmal history and organize opportunities to speak out against them. We are so proud of the energy and tenacity the community supplied to our campaign. Columbus DSA will continue to oppose tax handouts for the rich so long as the working people of our city struggle to find housing that is affordable, dignified, and secure. We are sick of watching the working class get cut out of the deal. We are tired of seeing our schools gutted, our public services plundered, and our neighbors left to rot on the sidewalk. We are finished with the housing crisis being used as an excuse to build playgrounds for the wealthy instead of seeing our people safe. A bed for every person. A meal in every stomach. A city for every one of us. That is our future, and we are the ones to build it. Not Blackstone.

By Emil McDonald

On Saturday, July 22, 2023, fifty workers and community members rallied at San Francisco City Hall in solidarity with 340,000 UPS Teamsters. Since UPS walked away from the bargaining table earlier in the month, UPS workers had been busy preparing for a potential August 1 national strike with the potential to shut down 7 percent of U.S. GDP.

The tide had turned a day earlier, when UPS relented and agreed to return to the bargaining table. Just a few days later, on July 25, the union announced a tentative agreement (TA) for a new five-year contract. Members will be voting on whether to ratify the TA through August 22, and the strike deadline has been postponed. 

At the July 22 rally, Emil McDonald, a five-year UPS worker and member of Teamsters Local 315 in Richmond, CA, spoke about the changes that he saw in the union’s rank and file, and beyond, as a result of strike preparations. – The Editors

A UPS Teamster at the Local 315 “practice picket” in Richmond, July 20. (Photo: R. Marcantonio)

As many of you may know, on July 5th negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS broke down. UPS told our negotiating committee they had “nothing more to give.”  This is a company that recently paid more than $5 billion dollars in dividends to Wall Street and bought back $3.5 billion of its own stock so that executives and major shareholders could fatten their wallets. 

Not only do we know that UPS has a LOT more to give —- we’re gonna make sure they give it.  We’ve made it perfectly clear to UPS that if they can’t find the money to give our essential workers a living wage and reward some of the hardest working people in the country for the tens of billions of dollars we made them during the pandemic,  UPS executives will be putting their own company on strike and that profit faucet is gonna get shut off. 

Thank you all so much for being here and for supporting UPS Teamsters as we fight for a contract that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and bring historic change to our union.

The kind of change I’m talking about isn’t just union leadership that is willing to build a credible strike threat and go to the mat for our lowest-paid members. It is the experience of rank-and-file Teamsters put into motion, united with the community to win a good contract for ourselves. 

For the last few weeks, all over the country UPS Teamsters have been holding practice pickets outside of our hubs joined by DSA, PSL, Jobs with Justice, our friends and families–even some of our customers. 

Drivers I work with are asking me about these signs they keep seeing up out on road. In store windows, taped to peoples’ front doors—some have even taped the signs up inside their trucks. 

Your efforts are not going unnoticed. It is one thing to feel cheated or unappreciated as an individual worker. Everyone here has felt that and it sucks. But when you see that you are not alone and that you have brothers and sisters who are willing to fight with you and that the community has your backs — it can be a very powerful thing. 

The experience of banding together and fighting for something that’s right changes you. It cuts through all of the noise and the cultural divides that keep us powerless and disillusioned.  

A couple of Teamsters in my local — who to my knowledge had never attended a picket line before — came out to San Francisco this week to join academic workers at a rally at the UC Regents meeting.  This is the kind of change I’m talking about. Seeing yourself as part of a broader labor movement.  United we fight, divided we beg. 

Emil McDonald celebrates a successful practice picket with a co-worker (Photo: R. Marcantonio.)

Whatever happens between now and when we have a new UPS contract, the contract campaign over the last year has created hundreds if not thousands of new shop floor leaders in our union and given us experience organizing against one of the largest corporations in the United States.  This is something we will continue to build on in the coming years. Militant stewards will be born out of this fight.  Solidarity will be born out of this fight. Five years from now, when it’s time to negotiate the 2028 contract, we will be many times stronger and many times wiser from the start. 

And guess what?  It turns out maybe UPS does have something more to give than poverty wages. They must have checked their couch cushions and went to Coinstar because this week they reached out to our union requesting to go back to the table in an effort to avoid a strike.  

But when Sean O’Brien and our NorCal negotiators go back to the table next week they will not be alone.  They will be backed by the tens of thousands of Teamsters who attended practice pickets, 80,000 supporters who signed petitions demanding a living wage for part-time workers and the knowledge that our members — backed by our brothers and sisters in the labor movement and our communities —- are ready to strike if we have to to win what we deserve. 

Emil McDonald is a UPS Teamster and a member of Local 315 in Richmond, CA.

The delegation of the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists ofAmerica stands with the BDS Working Group in support of their proposed amendment to NPC Recommendation #8, “Make DSA an […]

The post HDSA for an Anti-Zionist DSA appeared first on Houston DSA.

For Immediate Release: July 28th 2023

Contact righttocounseljc@gmail.com

The Right to Counsel JC coalition is not surprised by Ron Simoncini’s baseless and frivolous lawsuit meant to slow down the implementation of much needed aid for Jersey City’s housing crisis.

• The Mount Laurel legal decisions made in the New Jersey Supreme Court give municipalities the right to do what they would like with money raised for the affordable housing trust, including utilizing the fees for administrative purposes like distributing the Right to Counsel program.

• Landlords and property owners are already favored by the system, the law, and are more often than not already represented in housing court. This is about balancing the scales and joining 20 other jurisdictions that have also passed RTC.  

• The will to fund our right to counsel with a fee that many other cities in New Jersey have also raised is a political decision. We plan to primarily organize a mass movement of tenants to bring public political pressure on these shady real estate actors, but also fight the suit and win.

• We cannot let a few rich and powerful real estate players determine policy that impacts the over 70% of people who rent in our city.

For over a year, UPS Teamsters have been prepping for the largest private-sector contract fight this country has seen in decades – saving money for personal strike funds, signing pledge cards, and in more recent weeks, organizing practice pickets in the early morning hours outside of UPS facilities. UPS, meanwhile, repeatedly delayed the bargaining process by failing to come to the table in good faith and presenting workers with an inadequate contract. Following broken down negotiations mid-July, thousands of Teamsters and community supporters flocked to practice picket lines and began to seriously accelerate preparations for a nationwide strike.

After weeks of coordinated practice pickets and the increasing fear of a work stoppage, UPS was convinced to return to the bargaining table. On Tuesday July 25th, the Teamsters national negotiating committee announced a tentative agreement with UPS, subject to a vote of its membership which will begin August 3 and last until August 22. DSA stands in unflinching solidarity with the 350,000 UPS Teamsters whose tireless militancy gave their negotiating committee strong leverage throughout this fight.

Despite the narrative pushed by corporate media that the deal is entirely sealed, approval of this tentative agreement is entirely up to the rank-and-file to vote on, and Atlanta DSA commits to stand with workers no matter the outcome of this vote. The gains made in this tentative deal were only possible because of years of hard work and rank-and-file organizing on the ground, and the credible threat of a strike that would cost the company billions. Contrary to UPS’s narrative, it was worker power – not corporate benevolence – that forced UPS’s hands in making significant concessions like ending the two-tier wage system, protecting against forced overtime, securing air conditioning in delivery trucks, making MLK day a paid holiday, and more. Workers bravely organized to withhold their labor, hold down picket lines, and build meaningful community support for their efforts. For this all UPS Teamsters should be extremely proud, and we are proud to stand in solidarity with them through the duration of this fight until the last vote is cast and beyond!

Under capitalism, major companies like UPS are incentivized to maximize profits at all costs, at the expense of human safety and dignity. Both part-time and full-time UPS workers bore the brunt of the pandemic – risking their own lives to deliver essential medication and other goods to working people and families around the country. These workers on the front lines are the reason UPS brought in record breaking profits of $10 billion in 2021, and still, because of corporate greed, UPS CEO Carol Tomé takes home a larger salary in one day than the average UPS worker earns an entire year. DSA will always stand with workers fighting back against injustice and demanding their fair share — no matter whether Teamsters vote to accept or reject their TA. The UPS Teamsters have run a militant, fighting campaign that left a major company shaking in its boots. Their organizing will inspire workers everywhere to continue building power and resistance through their leverage to withhold their labor. Solidarity forever – when workers fight, we win!

When workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island won the first union at an Amazon distribution facility on April 1, 2022, by voting to form the independent Amazon Labor Union, their stunning victory was a surprise and an inspiration. Now, a little over a year later, workers at that same facility are organizing for reform to the Amazon Labor Union, which they say has adopted a top-down structure that stifles shop floor democracy. Regular listeners of Revolutions per Minute will certainly be familiar with union reform efforts in more established unions like UAW, the Teamsters, and UFCW, but the Reform ALU movement brings a new twist to this common story by organizing within an independent union that has yet to reach a first contract for its workers. To understand this moment and what led up to it, we speak live with David-Desyrée, a worker-organizer at the JFK8 facility and a member of the Amazon Labor Union Democratic Reform Caucus.

Follow the reform efforts inside Amazon Labor Union on Twitter @ReformALU or Instagram @reform_alu.